USAToday, in typical sensationalistic fashion, presented a fictionalized piece about general aviation on June 18th. I found it to be inaccurate. Seems that I’m not the only one.
From AOPA:
A USA Today story, “Unfit for flight,” published June 18 “gets the general aviation safety record wrong, it ignores efforts by the industry to make general aviation safer, and it violates basic tenets of fairness and accuracy when it comes to good journalism,” AOPA said in response to the article.
The three-part report paints GA aircraft as death traps, pilots as “amateur,” and aircraft manufacturers as villains, and pits pilots against manufacturers. AOPA, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, and Textron had provided information to the reporter, information that was not included in the sensational, one-sided, inaccurate report.
“The article leads one to believe that general aviation is an unsafe form of transportation, but in truth, general aviation has demonstrated significant progress in safety. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the number of fatalities has declined by over 40 percent since the early 1990s. Of course mentioning that sort of fact would have undermined reporter Tom Frank’s narrative; you won’t find those statistics in his piece,” AOPA said.
Frank’s article says quite the opposite, calling one fatal accident a “part of a massive and growing death toll from small-aircraft crashes.” The article cites 45,000 deaths in the past 50 years, and specifically calls out 347 fatalities from 1,199 accidents in 2013. However, it conveniently neglects including the total number of operations and flight hours, which AOPA pointed out.
You can read the AOPA article HERE.